EMISCA

This collection deliberately brings together work which is chronologically, geographically and generically diverse. Texts studied include traditional narrative historiography, alongside poetry, chronicles, charters, dispute settlements and hagiography. The essays range from Italy and Frankia to Scandinavia and England, as they examine texts produced from the seventh to the early twelfth century. In exploring the nature and function of narrative in texts, which modern scholars use to study the Middle Ages, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume integrate social, political, intellectual and literary history. Each essay and the volume as a whole illustrate that narrative form offers both new vantage points on the Middle Ages and new opportunities for collaborative study.

Traditional historiography generally stresses the opposition and contradiction between secular and ecclesiastical power. By contrast, this volume focuses upon the interdependence of secular and ecclesiastical power and on the ways both secular rulers, kings, counts and other lords, and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions continuously interacted, trying to affirm the relationships between them. This selection of a historiographical introduction plus nine case-studies from England, northern France and the Low Countries enables a subtle comparison of secular and ecclesiastical links and social interactions in a series of regional and local contexts during the Central Middle Ages. The volume demonstrates that this process of negotiation led to an affirmation of shared values and contributed to the creation of common social values in medieval Europe.

Ludo Milis (Universiteit Gent), “This book, composed around three major themes (‘Texts as Tools of Power’, ‘Land and Kinship’, and ‘Conflict and Affirmation’), exemplifies how medievalists can reshape their discipline into a more responsive one. Its scope is not to offer a wide range of definitive explanations, but it shows how medievalists should try (and indeed do try) to return to a close reading of their documents. For far too long, institutional history, legal history, and histoire événémentielle have tried to monopolize power relationships and to encapsulate them in rather narrow explanatory schemes. This volume offers a broader and more encompassing approach.”

Was there a women’s movement in the thirteenth century and is such a question meaningful in its medieval context? Far from being resolved, the issue of whether women had a thirteenth-century renaissance has still decisively to unsettle the periodization of Western European history in twelfth and sixteenth-century humanist renaissances. Herbert Grundmann long ago demonstrated the participation of women in the eremitically-inspired reforming movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the production of vernacular literature. Yet it is upon his work that this volume builds, for the diocese of Liège is the key area in this development. It was from Liège that Jacques de Vitry approached the papacy to secure permission for the women of the bishopric of Liège, France and Germany to live together and to promote holiness in each other by mutual example. The seventeen contributors to this volume examine not only the beguine religious life in the southern Low Countries, but also the impact of this movement on later medieval Sweden, England and France, the new modes of influence exerted by women in their religious lives, and the revivals of feminine spirituality in the late medieval West through to contemporary North America. Research does not yet allow for a whole new synthesis, but this volume directs scholars to detailed work on specific localities and persons, with an awareness of the problems and possibilities of wider European comparisons.